Though the World Explode
by StaroftheDunedain
Summary: Post Fall: At first, John only saw Sherlock on Thursdays when he visited the grave. PTSD! His doctor brain screamed at him. Double PTSD! Go home before you start seeing little green men! Not slash.


Disclaimer: I own nothing, sadly, except, well, nope, I don't even own John's curtains.

AN: This is inspired by Day of the Dead and the Vincent Starrett poem 221B. Spoilers sort of for the Fall.

At first, John only saw Sherlock on Thursdays when he visited the grave. _PTSD_! He doctor brain screamed at him. _Double PTSD! Go home before you start seeing little green men_! John was inclined to listen to his doctor brain, even as he started seeing Sherlock in shops and, oddly, on dates. It was kind of comforting in a way, so he neglected to tell his therapist.

Yes, he had made attempts to move on. He got a new flat in a terrible neighborhood on the other side of London. The doctor's bag and willingness to treat anyone had earned him clemency from half the population. The Browning and willingness to use it earned clemency from the other half. He never brought women back, however, because he was Sherlock's only heir (aside from the rent still paid to Mrs. Hudson) and he never could get around to unpacking the boxes in his tiny sitting room.

Mrs. Hudson had come over the first week to "help make things more cheerful" and, as a result, John had garish purple tartan curtains and a picture of a slightly psychotic looking horse on his wall. He never could muster up the energy to take them down. He also had a rickety table, a mustard colored armchair, a bed, and a new dresser.

He thought he had handled Sherlock's suicide well, better than anyone had expected him too. For months, everyone had walked on eggshells around him, but he was never prone to wallowing in his misery. He hadn't taken up drinking, or smoking. He still went to see his therapist, and hadn't cried himself to sleep in years. He had no more nightmares than could be expected, the same as any war veteran, although they centered around blood on his palm from the pulse of a crushed neck at the bottom of a building.

He went to work every day, Monday-Friday. He was always willing to work weekends. The patients loved him, although a few of the children sometimes noticed a lingering sort of sadness. He came home and tended to more patients, the poorer members of society who looked on him as a godsend. Sometimes, if he was paid in food he would heat it up, and otherwise it was a poke-and-ping before going to bed.

He did laundry regularly, and grocery shopped (although he avoided the chip-and-pin machines). He even had the infrequent beer with Lestrade, or cup of tea with Mrs. Hudson or Molly. He dated much less infrequently, but they never lasted all that long.

He never fell into the depression everyone expected. When everyone asked him how he felt, the answer he never told them was "hollow." Nothing he did, no one he met, was ever going to fill that gaping hole of friend and purpose and danger and everything else that life as Sherlock's blogger, which Sherlock himself, had offered. He accepted that as one of life's many unfairnesses and covered it up the way a bandage covered a wound. Eventually it would scar and only an ugly mark that always felt cold would remain lingering ever present in the mind of the wounded.

John has his share of scars.

Then, one evening, he was making a cup of tea to go with the marsala given him by the mother of a boy with a bad cold, when he heard a familiar voice say "The father of that boy has a meth problem—you might want to watch whatever else was cooked there."

John dropped his mug. Sherlock looked startled. "Could you hear that?"

John slumped onto the kitchen floor, world going gray.

When he opened his eyes several minutes later, Sherlock was crouched near him. "I'm sorry about that, John. I had no idea you would be so affected."

John reached out, but his hand passed right through the other man's arm. "Am I going mad?"

"If you were going mad, don't you think that you'd have imagined me speaking before this?" Sherlock looked miffed at his lapse in logic.

John smiled. "So, you're a ghost then?"

"So it appears," Sherlock said, sending an angry glare in the general direction of his midsection. "I cannot tell you how long I spent trying to get your attention—but the metaphysical is deucedly hard to figure out when you can't turn a page."

"It's good to see you," John admitted.

"Only most of me," Sherlock corrected, holding up a hand. He was a little on the see-through and grayish side.

"It doesn't matter," John said, turning to pick up the pieces of the broken mug before he could forget and slice up his feet. "It's been three years."

"As I said, the metaphysical is difficult."

"I'm just glad you stopped by to see me."

"Where else would I go, John?"

The days turned into weeks. Sherlock was even more annoying as a ghost than he had been as a man. He followed John almost everywhere in ways; work, shopping, to the therapist, even on dates. He had also developed an irritating habit of disappearing with a loud popping sound whenever he was irritated at John's obtuseness, which replaced his irritating habit of flopping onto the couch with a thud he had when alive. He also needed a lot more done, such as photocopies made of individual book pages which could be spread out so that he could read without turning pages. He insisted that John get a telly to leave on when his patients were boring. He was snarky, and John's ear was filled with a constant stream of insults and observations that made him turn red and laugh at inopportune times.

They were both curious as to what would happen when Sherlock accompanied John to a bar to meet Lestrade. Nothing. Not when he had tea with Mrs. Hudson. Not when he went to Molly's engagement party. Not even when he met Mycroft at the gravestone. No one seemed to notice John's companion, even when he mimicked them in absurd and brilliant parodies. When John speculated as to why, Sherlock shot him _the look_, which John had not missed at all. No, not one bit.

"You're the only one who really _wants_ to see me, John."

Weeks turned into months. John started writing again, putting all of the stories into a box, just in case anyone ever proved Sherlock's reality. Sherlock himself had begun reaching out to other ghosts to solve some interesting cases involving their deaths, getting John to email Lestrade anonymously with his results. John came home more than once to find Sherlock talking to invisible people. He just got more furniture, because apparently ghosts could sit down. More than one night was spent grubbing for evidence with a critical Sherlock peering over his shoulder.

John never could see any of the other ghosts.

Months turned into years; John got married to a woman named Mary, a school teacher and Sherlock stopped coming around as often. John adored Mary, and tried his best to give her a good life and all of his attention, but she still left after 6 months, saying that their life couldn't compete with the ghost of the life he had lived before they met. John never told her how right she was.

After he had moved back into the dingy apartment, and Sherlock had resettled into his routine, John finally asked "Why?"

Sherlock looked up from all of the individual pages from the newspaper spread out on the floor. "Why what?" he asked sharply, clearly irritated at being interrupted.

John poured milk into his tea. "Why jump in the first place?"

"I thought I explained that in my note."

"Don't!" John slammed the cup onto the counter, breathing too fast and sharp. "All of these years, people still look at me like I was wrong. I never doubted, I always knew you were real, no matter what you said that day, just don't."

For once, Sherlock was stunned into silence.

Methodically, John began to mop up the spilled tea, gaining customary control on his temper. "I accepted a long time ago that this is it, this is the best my life will ever be. I deserve to know why my best friend is a dead man. I deserve to know if it as my fault."

Sherlock was silent for so long that John had begun to give up on actually getting an answer. Then, surprisingly, and without looking up, he said, "It was. I would have lived if I hadn't had something I couldn't lose."

When John worked out what he meant, he refused to feel guilty. If friendship was the cost of life, he would have died for Sherlock a hundred times over.

Years turned into decades. John's hair turned gray, the limp stayed gone, but his right shoulder became nearly immobile. The lines cut into his congenial face like glacier strata in granite. It became harder and harder to practice, or even to make it up the stairs to his office. Sherlock, of course, stayed young and beautiful. He was also slightly see-through and gray. Also, John could drink tea, so he considered himself the winner despite Sherlock's grumbling.

"I need to retire," he announced one night while Sherlock looked into boxes of dirt John had collected. He held his breath, wondering if, after all these years of friendship Sherlock would get bored with this very human weakness.

Sherlock did not even look up from his dirt boxes. "I always wanted to keep bees."

John wanted to cry with relief.

Decades turned into summers. At Sherlock's insistence, John bought a cottage in Sussex and bee hives. Sherlock liked to sit in a meadow in the middle of the buzzing, or, occasionally, in the hives themselves. John liked to putter around the small garden and listen to the Beatles.

It hurt Sherlock worse than hitting concrete when John fell and all he could do was flicker ineffectively in front of a few ambulance drivers while John hauled himself to the phone.

Summers turned into a cold winter. Seventeen-year-old Leslie Lestrade put her hand on her grandfathers' elbow and looked at the two marble tombstones sitting side-by-side. One, black and austere, read simply _Sherlock Holmes_ while the other, white, simply read _Dr John H Watson_. It was not enough, even for Leslie.

Across the graveyard, John leant against a tree and smiled. "Now what?"

"We move on I suppose," Sherlock replied, looking at his friend out of the corner of his eye.

John stood up, startled. "You mean it's that easy?

Sherlock snorted. "Almost everyone does it."

"If it's that easy, why haven't you done it already?

"Haven't the past 37 years taught you nothing, John?" He bumped their shoulders together just because he _could_ now, finally. "I'm lost without my blogger."

Greg Lestrade looked up from where his granddaughter was painstakingly placing daisies on the tombstone and saw, through the glare, two familiar figures.

One was tall, striding amongst the graves with a long, black coat flowing dramatically. The other, much shorter man, walked a space behind, steps crisp. While he was watching, the shorter one turned and gave Lestrade a perfect salute before the taller man grabbed him by the elbow and dragged his attention back to where it belonged.

Lestrade watched them walk away into the suddenly bright winter sunlight as the snow began to fall. "Goodbye gentlemen."

"Don't say that, Grandad," Leslie said, straightening and taking her grandfather's hand. "You always taught me that true heroes never leave us."

Lestrade laughed through the tears in his eyes, and for a moment Leslie saw the man who ran all over London in the footsteps of giants and legends. "Sometimes, Leslie my girl, I know what I'm talking about." They started to walk away from the stones for the last time.

"Our heroes never die."


End file.
